alt Hacker NewsI unfortunately agree. Years ago I realized the Mars talk was just talk when I noticed that Musk and SpaceX were not funding any of the other stuff you’d need to fund if you wanted to “make life multiplanetary.”
Continuing to iterate on self contained biospheres and long term closed cycle life support? (Not a solved problem!) Working on construction techniques for the Moon or Mars? Studies on the dose response curve for gravity, like sponsoring a spin lab for the ISS to at least see if mice can reproduce in 0.3g? Self contained industrial infrastructure leaning heavily on 3D printers? Psychological research on the best way to build interiors and run social units?
Musk could personally fund all of that with little impact on his net worth.
It’s also decades of work. Some of what I listed is harder than the rockets. Better get started if you want to have a settlement on Mars this century.
Nope. Nothing. Just rockets, the a satellite network that is clearly “dual use.” Then Trump 2.0 and lots of “golden dome” (Star Wars 2.0) talk.
It’s not to go to Mars.
I love space and I hugely admire the engineering achievement, but it’s disappointing to learn for this and many other reasons that the people behind it were not the visionaries they pretended to be. They’re just more territorial apes obsessed with ape tribal stuff like race and nationalism and fighting over dirt at the bottom of a gravity well. Small minds with big toys.
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> a spin lab for the ISS to at least see if mice can reproduce in 0.3g?
That was done and the results were published a few months ago, but the study did not have any relationship with SpaceX.
The results were rather pessimistic for the long-term missions on Moon or Mars.
In my opinion, even if it is possible that humans might support a somewhat lower gravity than mice, the conclusion is that for interplanetary travel humans must use only spaceships that create artificial gravity by rotation.
The results of the study were that mice require a gravity of at least 2/3 of that of Earth to stay in perfect health and of at least 1/3 of that of Earth to avoid extremely severe health damage.
This means that even on Mars the gravity is not sufficient for long-term human life. In an underground Mars base, one could make a part with increased gravity by rotation, where the crew should spend most of the time, but that would increase a lot the complexity of building and maintaining such a base.
The Mars smokescreen was strong so a lot of people bought into it, even employees who didn't have the security clearances.
The origin of SpaceX with Michael D. Griffin and Pete Worden really make it clear though.
Oh I doubt very much he has given up on that. He's smart enough to know that the delivery time is going to be extremely variable, and that most of the other problems involve figuring out how to make the place palatable to humans, which is just too far in the future right now. Don't bite off more than you can chew.
The silver lining is that if Elon had continued pushing for Mars, to not let it happen organically, Mars would become a company town, with all the bad connotations that ever had, with paying for air added on top of it.
While I'm a little more optimistic that the development of Starship will lead to manned missions to the Moon, Mars, and other bodies in the solar system I drew a similar conclusion as you did a few years ago as well.
What I find frustrating about this is that a lot of the biological research needed to make a sustainable colony is stuff that would have direct benefits on Earth for people today.
R&D on bioreactors, genetically engineering organisms, making food production more efficient, techniques to make people more resistant to the cancer causing effects of radiation etc... all of these could have impacts on how we live today.
I don’t think is right at all. It’s just Musk focusing on the fundamentals of ‘what is stopping us making significantly (100x or 1000x) more progress on space exploration. And the answer to that is that it’s just too expensive to launch mass off the earth.
If you make it much cheaper, then everything else flows from that. You no longer have to spend years engineering everything at the cutting edge of your mass budget. You can use off the shelf parts, you can have redundancy.
The gains will come when these flights become commonplace.